Friday, 17 July 2015

Drawing Challenge - Week 4

I haven't been drawing in my Drawing Journal lately. Before you get upset, the last statement doesn't mean that I haven't been drawing at all. The challenge was that I draw every day, something I've been doing. I've been working really hard on the map for The Physician's Apprentice and the overview map of The Salamander Series.

In spite of the fact that I've made a lot of progress on the map, I don't want to show you the whole thing yet. The reasons for this are as follows :

1) It's not done (in fact, it's pretty far from being done and the details that need to be included still are kind of boggling my mind).
2) Because of point #1, you won't be impressed by it as it is. The colouring is shaky and incomplete, the line art hasn't been cleaned up, the cities and most landmarks need to be included and I hid the text for the screenshot I'm showing you. I don't want you knowing details about it yet!! :D
3) It contains locations I want to keep secret for now. The first novel mostly plays off in one particular kingdom, but I have drawn some details in some of the other kingdoms. I can't show you these now, because of plot spoilers.
4) I may not release the whole map at all. I'm still deciding on this.

Let me elaborate on the last two points.

This world is a leap and a bound different from Evangellion's world. It's a lot more intricate, for one. There are loads more land masses, belonging to a variety of people and ranging in climate circumstances. This means more diverse terrain and landmarks. I don't know what all of these landmarks will be yet, because I don't know in which exact locations the rest of the series will take place. I don't want to sketch a bunch of things just to fill space now and realise later that it could have been used differently to suit the story better. In easier terms, I don't want to limit myself.

The more important reason is that this world is pretty harshly divided between the north and south. I can't go into too many details here, so I'm going to explain it in as little as possible words and hope I don't reveal too much. This is going to be very difficult to me, because all I want to do is BLAB about this novel!!!!

Anyway. The people in the north aren't too concerned about those in the south and they basically don't care much what the southerners do. Therefore, the northern folk DON'T HAVE COMPLETE MAPS of their world. And, as you've probably guessed, the story is set in the north. For that reason, from the narrative's perspective, my characters don't know what the south looks like. By extension, the reader won't know, which means I want to leave out the southern part of the map for as long as possible.

There is a very real chance that I won't ever publish this map. I'm doing it more for my own reference at the moment than to include in a book. We'll see though. My mind changes at the speed of sound.

Here's a very little, very zoomed in part of what I've got so far.

I have to add a ton of details, like cities and roads. As I said above, it's far from done. The size of the sketch is almost a meter in width and 70 cm in height. That is massive, and all of it is filled with worldiness. Yes, I just made up a word. :) Hopefully I'll be able to show you more next time.